George Chauncey: The Historian Behind Lawrence v. Texas

George Chauncey is a modest man. Shy, even. A few minutes before he began a lecture this past spring, just about every one of those swing-armed deskettes that populate Cobb Hall seminar rooms was occupied. The Chicago history professor entered, flushing a bit; sat, set down some papers; stood up; exchanged a few words—only a few—with his host, the head of the campus chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. He returned to his chair, crossed his legs, then his arms, as if protecting his body. Students were still filtering in—30, then 40, then 50. It was long past standing room only when Chauncey opened with a mumbled confidence that he said he hadn’t told anyone in 25 years. “But since this is sponsored by the ACLU, I’ll say it. When I was a teenager I was invited to join the board of directors of the Richmond, Virginia, ACLU for my work on high-school rights.”

It was an appropriate entrée to the evening’s subject: The bashful professor, author of one of the most acclaimed works of scholarship of the 1990s, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940, had once again been compelled into a public fight for civil liberties. He was there to explain the amicus curiae brief he had written in the Supreme Court case of Lawrence v. Texas, which the court relied upon in rendering its June 26 decision that laws regulating what goes on sexually behind closed doors between consenting adults of any gender have no place in our constitutional order.

Begin the story in 1986, when the Supreme Court handed down Bowers v. Hardwick, a decision that sharply reversed the court’s own trend toward protecting privacy—but only for a single group of people: same-sex couples. Upholding the constitutionality of state sodomy laws, the majority argued that banning gay sex was allowable because such proscriptions were “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition.” Chauncey, then a graduate student in the embryonic field of gay history, recognized the fallacy behind this reasoning. Sodomy laws, for most of America’s history, were not antihomosexuality laws but bans on all manner of nonprocreative sex. Then came the 1970s. Most states repealed their sodomy statutes as embarrassing anachronisms. But some passed new laws outlawing gay sex exclusively. These laws were as deeply rooted in America’s history and tradition as the lava lamp. At Cobb, Chauncey explained the significance: Bowers did not merely uphold some originary tradition of outlawing sodomy. “It reinterpreted it as if it applied to homosexual couples only. The court said, ‘It’s okay to single out these people.’” Thus a Supreme Court decision became “the cornerstone for a whole edifice of discrimination against gays.” Opponents of, say, placing foster children with gays or gay adoptions could now rely on Bowers: criminals make unfit parents. Right-wing activist groups could also cite the decision, accelerating their efforts to strike down gay antidiscrimination laws.

Chauncey, his shyness gone, paused to let the packed room absorb the exposition. Attentions were galvanized. When he gets started on his favorite subject—exposing the shabby underbelly of our received notions of what is “timeless” when it comes to sex and gender—attentions always are.

Chauncey was born the year of another landmark Supreme Court civil-rights case, 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. As a historian he makes devastating arguments about how closely the racial prejudices of that era resemble the sexual prejudices of our own. He argues from personal experience as well. His father was a Presbyterian minister in the South who was loved—initially—by every congregation he led. “Then,” Chauncey recalls, “he would do these things that shocked them.” The thing he did in his first pulpit in Brownsville, Tennessee (pop. 5,000), was to express his support for Brown v. Board of Ed. The young family was politely told to leave town. At his next post he helped escort the children who integrated Little Rock Central High in 1957. “That night we had death threats,” Chauncey recalls.

It was only in Richmond, working for the national staff of the Southern Presbyterian Church, that George Chauncey Sr. could first agitate in relative security—against, by then, the Vietnam War. George Jr. was his father’s son. In high school he organized a failed movement to desegregate the cafeteria, a citywide high- school student antiwar group, and an underground newspaper. (For this last he was called into the principal’s office, recited his constitutional rights, and allowed to continue. The local ACLU took note.) In the process he was beaten by the tough white kids, anointed with the monikers “nigger lover,” “egghead,” and “peace freak.” By his junior year, when things were so bad he would instinctively flinch when he saw the bullies walking down the hall, he was marked further as “queer” and “faggot.” It had nothing to do with whom he was attracted to sexually—he would only recognize himself as gay in college—but with a sin eggheads of all orientations will find familiar: “I didn’t play sports well.” In an inchoate way, it had something to do with his future vocation.

Decades later scholars of sexuality would arrive at a rule of thumb: how a society organizes its sex and gender norms is often complexly codetermined with the manner in which it organizes its other major axes of social classification—in America, race and class. It becomes second nature for high-school bullies to further stigmatize someone who fraternizes too easily with blacks by questioning his manhood; in that way what constitutes “normal” is produced and reproduced. This insight has launched a thousand cultural-studies papers. But Chauncey arrived at it without benefit of theory, foreshadowing how he would later make a living. Unlike those cultural-studies scholars, Chauncey always grounds broad insights about processes of social and identity formation in the experiences of real people as recorded in the documents they left behind.

The written history of gays and lesbians began more than a century ago on a less promising intellectual footing: filiopietistic tracts celebrating all the gay (or presumed-gay) greats through the ages. The field’s scholarly legitimacy was established by the late Yale professor John Boswell, who in his 1980 tour de force Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality mobilized sources in a dozen languages to demonstrate that sex between men had been a tolerated facet of life for the Christian West’s first millennium. Boswell was an important mentor for Chauncey. “I was thinking about doing history,” he recalls, “and I wanted to know what it would be like as a gay man”—just as a gay man, not as a scholar of gays. At that point he was launching a senior thesis on Rhodesian copper miners. “That was still back in the time when you might have these sort of conversations in hushed tones.” Boswell was encouraging, for Chauncey was a promising student whose senior thesis earned him a fellowship to Zambia.

After that came graduate school at Yale. There Chauncey encountered his second great mentor, in Nancy Cott’s first-semester seminar in U.S. history. “About the only thing I take credit for with regard to George,” Cott laughs, “was that my course was interesting enough that he decided to change to U.S. history.” He says it was “the way she approached historical problems” that intrigued him.

Cott’s 1978 classic The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835, published just before Chauncey began his Ph.D., examined the history of two ideologies, one so apparently entrenched it’s been hard to see as an ideology at all—the notion of complementary “separate spheres” for women and men. The other was a construct of apparently more modern vintage: feminism. Cott discovered that their emergence was simultaneous, one helping to constitute the other; both accompanied the 19th-century revolution in market capitalism and the concomitant breakdown in the system of household production. This most productive insult to intuition can be seen, in retrospect, as an early masterpiece in an emerging historical methodology: studying the formation of entire categories of identity—in this case the “true” woman—as a historical process, through close analysis of historical documents. Chauncey would go on to apply this emerging method to the sexual categories of “gay” and “straight.”

But the idea snuck up on him. He decided to write his final paper for that first-year seminar on turn-of-the-century medical literature on lesbianism. He came armed with an assumption shared by both Boswell and the filiopietists who preceded him: homosexuals had always and everywhere existed. “My plan had been to look at shifting medical explanations for these phenomena,” Chauncey says. He came away from his canvas realizing that it wasn’t the explanations that were ambiguous, but rather what was being explained. Reading the earliest articles, he casually transposed the Victorian term “invert” into our familiar “homosexual”—a word that began showing up in 20th-century articles. He was caught up short: the two terms didn’t refer to the same thing. His sense of what that signified became clearer when he wrote another paper early in his graduate career, “Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion? Homosexual Identities and the Construction of Sexual Boundaries in the World War I Era,” in which he found that some men who enjoyed sex with other men weren’t stigmatized as homosexuals at all—so long as they never took the “female” role in intercourse.

Chauncey finished the piece realizing that he didn’t even know what a “homosexual” was. This kind of radical skepticism was already familiar to readers of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose first volume of The History of Sexuality was translated into English in 1978. But where Foucault saw new identities emerging solely via the discourse of an all-powerful medical science, the first-year graduate student trumped the maître penseur by demonstrating that the doctors were really just trying to catch up with the streets—to grasp new sexual identities emerging in increasingly visible, urban, gay-male subcultures.

Both of Chauncey’s papers were published, the first in the prestigious journal Salmagundi in a special issue devoted to homosexuality whose cover featured Chauncey’s name alongside Boswell and Foucault. Both became classics in the field—the second reprinted in ten collections in three languages. Nevertheless, Chauncey had been warned: writing an actual dissertation on gay urban subcultures would be professional suicide. Boswell, a savvy manager of his own career, knew of what he spoke; he had waited for his first, traditional monograph to be embraced before submitting an earlier one on homosexuality for publication. And so it was on a safer topic, the persecution of gays in the 1950s Red Scare, that Chauncey began his first dissertation attempt. He spent a year on the project, then quit to risk a study of gay urban life. “Once he started writing the history of gay New York,” Cott recalls, “he made very rapid progress. It was like a statue in the marble trying to get out.” And “Gay New York: Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940” was a blockbuster. It won the top dissertation awards for both the Yale history department and the entire university; it also won the department’s triennial gold medal for a “pioneering work of scholarship.” One history chair considering him for a tenure-track hire, Chauncey was told, plunked down the work at a departmental meeting with the frank assessment, “This is amazing.”

Then he is supposed to have added: “Now let’s hire this conventional political historian instead.”

George Chauncey almost didn’t get to join the historical profession at all. Over lunch in Hyde Park, he reflects, “My advisers had been right. It was almost professional suicide to write this dissertation.”

The lot of homosexuality scholars had certainly improved since the early 1970s, when their first conference, organized in Manhattan by activist, playwright, and historian Martin Duberman, was emptied by a bomb threat—or since 1985, when a van of scholars traveling from Buffalo hid their destination, a conference sponsored by the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, from the customs agent lest they be detained at the border. Although the intellectual mood among those collective pioneers was exciting—“just exactly why you’re an academic,” rhapsodizes Martha Vicinus of the University of Michigan, who met Chauncey at the 1982 Amsterdam conference—getting their work established within the academy was difficult. Chauncey spent 1988 through 1990 unsuccessfully pounding the pavement for a permanent academic job. To many his subject matter seemed odd, off-putting, queer—too far afield from the familiar to merit that most conservative of investments, the tenure-track post. To others it seemed to embody the most awful trends in the humanities: faddishness, wanton provocation, political correctness. A story reached him through the grapevine: a faculty member at one of the three schools to grant him an on-campus interview terminated his candidacy in part because Chauncey’s dissertation was dedicated to his then-partner. “Clearly,” he was reported to have said, “this is a work of advocacy, not scholarship.”

Meanwhile Chauncey, Vicinus, and Duberman had edited Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past. The collection—an omnibus of scholarship on subjects from pederasty in ancient Athens to the nearly compulsory nature of bisexual desire in early modern Japan, to the “marriages” between “straight” men toiling in South African gold mines, to the community formation of gay men serving in World War II—was soon a syllabus staple. Chauncey began giving invited lectures at universities across the country. Only the job opportunities lagged. A national gay-studies conference that first drew 200 scholars in 1987 attracted 2,000 in 1992—but that same year Chauncey felt compelled to offer a reflective presentation at the Association of American University Presses convention called “Publish and Perish.” Young scholars of sexuality were doing both: putting out great work and seeing history faculties hire traditional political historians instead.

But by 1992 Chauncey himself was finally finishing his first year of a true-blue university faculty appointment—in a job for which he almost didn’t apply.

Warning: what you are about to read seems fit only for a storybook. Or for an alumni magazine. But it’s all true.

The ad placed by the University of Chicago history department in 1990 was about as open-ended as such ads can be: calling for “applications for the position of assistant professor, tenure track, in all fields of interest. Candidates from neighboring disciplines with a strong historical interest are invited to apply.” When current history chair Kathleen Conzen dug it out from the departmental files, she was surprised by just how vague it was. But not too surprised. “We’re least successful when when we set out to hire a particular kind of historian than if we simply seek out what’s interesting.”

Chauncey was skeptical; he had been through enough by then to suspect that a school with as hidebound a reputation as Chicago’s was hardly worth the stamp. He sent in his application package belatedly and indifferently; then it floated to the top of the hulking stack. “At our end it was rather undramatic,” recounts Professor Michael Geyer, chair of the hiring committee. “We were quite undramatically unanimous that he was one of the people we wanted to listen to. Very strong letters of recommendation marked him as one of the most innovative social and cultural historians.” Geyer recalls, “All along the way I expected someone to raise flags.” None emerged—“and this is not a bunch of people that wouldn’t raise flags if they wanted to.” When he hears how hard a time Chauncey had being taken seriously by other schools, his answer is straightforward: “That’s the kind of fog you sometimes have to look through.”

It would take another article entirely to do justice to the extraordinary things that transpired when Gay New York came out in 1994. Basic Books was eager to put it out in time for the 25th anniversary of the event universally considered gay liberation’s birth date: June 26, 1969, when police raided the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, and its clientele, a motley assortment of drag queens preeminent among them, dared fight back. Chauncey darkens when he recalls the push to get the book finished: “Literally, for about 18 months,” while teaching at Chicago, “I would take about one Friday or Saturday night off a month.” He met his deadline (after several anxious and unnecessary last-minute calls to Cott, reading paragraphs to her over the phone to make sure he had gotten them exactly right). Basic met its deadline too, presenting Chauncey the finished book only six weeks after he delivered the final text. The author was dead on his feet. He had surmounted the traditional long lag time between the completion of a manuscript and its publication. Now he thought he would have to endure the customary yearlong wait for scholarly books to get reviewed.

He waited two months. On June 19, 1994, as Gay New York began filtering through bookstores, the Sunday New York Times was a Chaunciad. In his editorial-page column Frank Rich used the book to advance the lesson George Chauncey first learned in high school: that the history of discrimination against gays “can’t easily be blamed on historical or religious precedent, but only on our own minds and hearts; it is we who stigmatized gay people to shore up our own embattled definitions of manhood.” In his architecture column Herbert Muschamp argued one of the book’s central and most difficult themes, that the identity “heterosexual” was a recent human invention because “sexual preference has not always been the crucial standard by which the normality of men is measured.”

The next Sunday’s Times was a repeat. The lead op-ed was a précis of his book’s arguments—by George Chauncey. And the Book Review pined for a sequel (Chauncey is completing that project, The Strange Career of the Closet, this summer). Some time later Chauncey wrote an obituary of John Boswell for the London Guardian, noting that gays “who never met Boswell spoke of him with an awe bordering on reverence and with the deepest sense of gratitude.” Meanwhile, on June 28 Stonewall was being celebrated in the streets, and in New York Chauncey experienced a Boswell-like moment: marching in a parade with friends, “bystanders would yell at me, ‘Love the book!’ It happened to me a dozen times that day.” His tone suggests wonder; the week changed his life. “I had lived alone with this world I was recreating for such a long time, and suddenly everyone was invited in.” About the same time he met his partner, Ron Gregg, director of programming in the University’s Committee on Cinema & Media Studies.

With Gay New York Chauncey was on his way to being a minor celebrity. That summer the American Social History Project at George Mason University began plans to turn the book into a full-length documentary (the project is on hold for fund-raising). Soon Chauncey began showing up on TV as a talking head; by this year he was even 4 Down in a crossword puzzle published by a gay and lesbian newspaper syndicate. Which, of course, should afford no professor worth his Ph.D. reason to be impressed (as opposed to envious). But note the ironies that survived what academics might consider a work made suspicious by its success. This is not a forgiving book. Though at points entertaining, it makes none of the concessions to middlebrow taste—novelistic scenarios, plotting, and characterization—that it usually takes to make the public notice history. It’s dense with social-science language, thickened with abstruse historiographic debates, numbingly documented, and full of the community-building tropes of a social historian’s social historian: we need more research on X.... Resources exist for an necessary study of Y. Its popularity also can’t be chalked up to the standby charges of the anti–political correctness trade: that it’s a therapeutic sop to the parade-patronizing victimization jockeys. Or that it is degraded by its commitment to—that dreaded word—advocacy.

Sure, Gay New York’s opening formulation was striking enough to earn a place in the Columbia World of Quotations: “In the half-century between 1890 and the beginning of the Second World War”—when systematic persecution of gays began evolving in earnest—“a highly visible, remarkably complex, and continually changing gay male world took shape in New York City.” But it also complexifies, at their very foundations, comforting bromides of gay mythology: that the community was uniquely and universally oppressed before it liberated itself by its own heroism in 1969; that therefore Sappho, Whitman, and, by extension, gays today are martyrs by the very fact of their existence.

Complexity is academic history’s coin of the realm. And Chauncey’s work has enjoyed success where it counts to him the most: among his academic peers, where the arguments one inspires, not the acclamation one receives, are how reputations are made and sustained. It would take still another article—or perhaps a monograph—to trace the influence of the arguments Chauncey has inspired, not merely in history, but also in disciplines as diverse as English and sociology. He has accomplished one of the hardest, most valuable things a historian can do: tell a richly debatable story about a social reality that had been so taken for granted it had never been debatable before. Few wouldn’t judge him an ornament to the University—where he has trained some of the most important new students in one of the most important new fields around. In 1997 he cofounded Chicago’s Gay and Lesbian Studies Project, which supports graduate students with financial and intellectual help. In 2000 the project hosted the biggest gay-studies conference in the field’s history, “The Future of the Queer Past.” (Law professor Geoffrey Stone, JD’71, provost at the time, notes that the event was held on campus during Parents Weekend. “I was proud of the fact we did that. Not many universities would.”) Few wouldn’t judge him an ornament to universities—where he has been instrumental in getting his field, at long last, safely institutionalized.

Cue chapter three: storm clouds. Begin in 1990, the year New Criterion editor Roger Kimball published Tenured Radicals, his assessment of recent trends in academia by then subsumed under the soubriquet “political correctness.” (“A swamp yawns before us, ready to devour everything...”). Newsweek’s December 24 cover article “The New McCarthyism” described the politically correct university as a place where “it would not be enough for a student to refrain from insulting homosexuals.... He or she would be expected to ‘affirm’ their presence on campus and to study their literature and culture alongside that of Plato, Shakespeare, and Locke.” It was all rather reckless, not least when you learn that conservative federal judge and Chicago law lecturer Richard Posner began researching his 1992 volume Sex and Reason after completing the quintessentially U of C act of reading Plato’s Symposium and—as he has recorded—being “surprised to discover that it was a defense, and as one can imagine a highly interesting and articulate one, of homosexual love.”

Fast forward to 1995, when the NYT Week in Review printed a piece that led, “Newly arrived in town, the lanky 28-year-old lawyer did not have money to buy bedding from the 23-year-old merchant. So the merchant made an offer. ‘I have a larger room with a double bed upstairs,which you are very welcome to share with me,’ he said. The lawyer beamed with pleasure as he accepted the kindness.”

The lawyer was Abraham Lincoln. The article—which didn’t mention that the lawyer and the merchant exchanged letters of extraordinary intimacy for many years afterward—went on to explore the rather reductionist question of whether today’s Republican Party should be more welcoming of gays because, after all, their founder was gay. Chauncey contributed a quite nonreductionist quote to the reporter: “That he could marry [a woman] and have a deep, psychologically and physically intimate friendship with Joshua Speed shows that he was operating in an emotional universe very difference from our own.” Another professor, Michael Burlingame of Connecticut College, was quoted thus: “I don’t see how the whole question of Lincoln’s gayness would explain anything other than making gay people feel better. And I don’t think the function of history is to make people feel good. Celebratory history is propaganda.” The furor that ensued, unsurprisingly, followed Burlingame’s knee-jerk logic. It inaugurated a new spell of debate over gay and lesbian scholarship’s very right to exist.

In 1997 Chauncey’s alma mater, Yale, rejected an offer from gay playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer to endow a professorship in gay and lesbian studies because, among other reasons, the field was too narrow for an endowed chair. (“I’d be happy to take the money,” Chicago provost Stone was quoted in the Times. “It is not too narrow. It is interesting and important and likely to be important for a long time.”) The Times piece also reported on “the uneven path” of new scholarly fields more generally, quoting a California state assemblyman’s comment on the University of California, Riverside’s undergraduate minor in lesbian, gay, and bisexual studies, “Gee, send somebody off to San Francisco for six months and let them learn there.” Then in the Wall Street Journal Roger Kimball denounced a women’s sexuality-studies conference at the State University of New York at New Paltz as evidence that “festivals of politicized sexual libertinage are now every day occurrences in many education and cultural institutions.” The New York Times picked up that story in an atrociously jumbled front-page piece that played closer to Kimball’s logic than to Stone’s. As did Sixty Minutes.

And so, to the general public, the situation stood: gay studies had finally been institutionalized in the academy—in the rank promotion of grotesquery and radical political advocacy. Until this year, when a powerful institution finally saw through the fog.

Back at Cobb Hall this past spring, Chauncey described the amicus “Historian’s Brief” he drafted for the Lawrence v. Texas case with the assistance of many prestigious cosignatories, including Cott; Lynn Hunt of the University of Pennsylvania; Mark Jordan of Emory, author of a study of the Catholic Church’s remarkably belated theological proscription of homosexuality; and Chicago’s Thomas Holt.

The piece proclaimed modest ambitions: “Amici, as historians, do not propose to offer the Court a legal doctrine to justify a holding that the Texas law violates the U.S. Constitution. Rather, amici believe they can best serve the Court by elaborating on two historical propositions important to the legal analysis: (1) no consistent historical practice singles out same-sex behavior as ‘sodomy’ subject to proscription, and (2) the governmental policy of classifying and discriminating against certain citizens on the basis of their homosexual status is an unprecedented project of the twentieth century, which is already being dismantled.” The Historian’s Brief for Case No. 02-102 John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Gardner v. State of Texas is by no means modest in its accomplishments. It provides the sharpest and most sweeping 30-page summary imaginable of the history of homosexuals and society’s response to them. But Chauncey is a modest man. He closed at Cobb—to a loud ovation and students asking him to autograph copies of Gay New York—optimistically predicting a victory for his side from the Supreme Court, though he mumbled doubt at the prospect the Court would pay any mind to his brief.

Chauncey was wrong. The heart of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s new legal doctrine in the 6–3 decision, ranging over some dozen paragraphs, is a virtual recapitulation of the Historian’s Brief arguments. In Justice Kennedy’s paraphrase, “[f]ar from possessing ‘ancient roots...American laws targeting same sex-couples did not develop until the last third of the Twentieth Century.” He went on to cite Foucault’s The History of Sexuality and several works that shared its (and Gay New York’s) social-constructionist paradigm, such as Jonathan Ned Katz’s The Invention of Heterosexuality (1995). In doing so, the majority vindicated a key abstraction of the new historiography: that homosexuality could not have been outlawed as such before the 20th century because “homosexual” as a category did not exist. And they did so not out of any imaginable political agenda—what would the agenda be?—but simply because it seemed to them true.

So taken was the Court, in fact, by the spirit of the historians’ approach to exposing the soft underbelly of received notions of what is “timeless” about sex and gender that it conducted some original research of its own—buttressing its endorsement by unearthing and analyzing primary documents not mentioned in the brief.

Back in 1997 Roger Kimball told the New York Times that gay studies is “profoundly dehumanizing.” Mike Wallace on Sixty Minutes, in an infamous “parental warning” before the broadcast, compared it to a dirty movie (“some of what is being taught on college campuses today is for mature audiences only”). The point is not that there is no work within the field of sexuality studies for which those criticisms may not apply. The problem is that those criticisms were part of a time, perhaps now past, when vast tracts of scholarship could be dismissed out of hand as so much postmodern, politically correct tribal cheerleading, simply because of their subject matter. And that, at bottom, is why the Lawrence decision, and Chauncey’s role in it, are important to those who care about scholarship and its relationship to society. The highest judicial body in the United States says that, in its historical incarnation at least, gay studies is sound scholarship. Bedrock, in fact, in combination with the relevant court precedents, for changing the law of the land. Chauncey couldn’t be happier. “I’m thrilled with the decision”—and that “the Court took the findings of recent historical scholarship seriously.”

Asked for a preview of his next piece of historical scholarship, The Strange Career of the Closet, Chauncey is purposefully vague—except to confirm that his title is a homage to Yale historian C. Vann Woodward, whose Strange Career of Jim Crow showed that civil-rights history is far more ironic than the customary, Whiggish narrative of inevitable progress allows. Though this he will reveal: “The next book will be more controversial, because of some of the arguments that I’ll make.” Controversial, he means, for other gay people. “I think also that we’re at a point in the development of gay culture and politics where it’s possible and really salutary to rethink some of our founding assumptions.”

George Chauncey is beyond question an advocate. But he is also, beyond question, a historian’s historian.

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Rick Perlstein, AB’92, is the author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (Hill & Wang, 2001), the winner of the Los Angles Book Prize for History. He is working on a book about Richard Nixon and the 1960s.

Here's some background on John Boswell, George Chauncey's mentor in the area of gay history.

In the Case of John Boswell
by Richard John Neuhaus

Until a few years ago there was little need to defend the assertion that Christianity has, in a clear and sustained manner, always taught that homosexual acts are morally wrong. That has now changed, and the change can be dated from 1980, the publication of John Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (University of Chicago Press). The influence of that book is truly remarkable; it has become a kind of sacred text for those who want to morally legitimate the homosexual movement. In certain circles, any allusion to what the Bible or Christian tradition say about homosexuality is likely to be met with, "Yes, but Boswell says . . ."

Boswell, a professor of history at Yale, says that in the early Church there were few sanctions against homosexuality. "Intolerance" of gays became characteristic of Christianity during the high middle ages when the Church tried to assert greater control over the personal lives of the faithful. In time, theologians such as Thomas Aquinas would provide a theological rationale for the prohibition of homosexual acts, and canon lawyers would give the prohibition force in ecclesiastical discipline. That, Boswell says, is the unhappy legacy that is still with us in the attitudes and laws prevalent in Western societies.

The Boswell book was at first met with widespread acclaim. The reviewer in the New York Times said Boswell "restores one's faith in scholarship as the union of erudition, analysis, and moral vision. I would not hesitate to call his book revolutionary, for it tells of things heretofore unimagined and sets a standard of excellence that one would have thought impossible in the treatment of an issue so large, uncharted, and vexed." The next year Boswell won the American Book Award for History. Since then the book has become a staple in homosexual literature.

For instance, Bruce Bawer's much discussed A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society (Poseidon Press) devotes page after page to a precis of Boswell, as though this is the only necessary text in Christian history dealing with homosexuality. And, of course, Boswell is routinely invoked in Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and other studies urging that the churches should at last overcome their "homophobia" and be "accepting" of homosexuals and homosexuality. "Boswell says" featured prominently also in last fall's Colorado court case in which gay activists sought (successfully, for the moment) to overthrow Amendment Two, a measure approved by the voters in 1992 and aimed at preventing special legal status for homosexuals as a class.

In sum, Boswell and his book have had quite a run. Among his fellow historians, however, Boswell has not fared so well. The scholarly judgment of his argument has ranged from the sharply critical to the dismissive to the devastating. But reviews in scholarly journals typically appear two or three years after a book is published. By that time the Boswell book had already established itself in many quarters as the definitive word on Christianity and homosexuality. In the draft statement on sexuality issued late last year by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), for instance, Boswell's interpretation of New Testament texts on homosexuality is uncritically accepted.

There are not many NT texts dealing explicitly with homosexuality. Extended treatment was not necessary as there is no evidence that St. Paul and other writers dissented from the clear condemnation of such acts in the Hebrew Scriptures. (Boswell and others make a limp effort to mitigate the sharp strictures of the Old Testament and rabbinic literature, but even some gay partisans recognize that that effort is not strikingly plausible.) The most cited NT passage on the subject is the Romans 1 discussion of "the wrath of God revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth." Such people are "without excuse," says Paul, because they have rebelled against the "eternal power and deity [that] is clearly perceived in the things that have been made." This rebellion finds also sexual expression: "For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error."

Another frequently cited passage is 1 Corinthians 6: "Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God." Against those who treat homosexuality as uniquely heinous, it is rightly pointed out that the Corinthian text makes clear that it is one of many behaviors incompatible with Christian discipleship. More important, this passage underscores that for homosexuals, as for adulterers et al., there is the possibility of forgiveness and new life. But none of this changes the clear assertion that homosexual behavior is wrong. And that has been the Christian teaching over the centuries.

The revisionists of the Boswell school make several interesting moves. They suggest, among other things, that the homosexual practices condemned by Paul were condemned because they were associated with idolatrous cults and temple prostitution. And it is true that Romans 1 is concerned with idolatry, but the plain meaning of the text is that homosexual acts are themselves an evidence of turning away from God and the natural order that he has ordained. Put differently, the point is not that some homosexual acts are wrong because they are associated with idolatrous cults; rather, homosexual acts are wrong because they are themselves a form of idolatry. New Testament scholar Richard Hays of Duke Divinity School is among those who are sharply critical of Boswell's mishandling of the New Testament material. Boswell's interpretation, says Hays, "has no support in the text and is a textbook case of reading into the text what one wants to find there." (The Journal of Religious Ethics [No. 14, 1986])

Boswell's reading of early Christian and medieval history also turns up what he wants to find. Christian history is a multifarious affair, and it does not take much sniffing around to discover frequent instances of what is best described as hanky-panky. The discovery process is facilitated if one goes through history with what is aptly described as narrow-eyed prurience, interpreting every expression of intense affection between men as proof that they were "gay." A favored slogan of the contemporary gay movement is "We Are Everywhere!" Boswell rummages through Christian history and triumphantly comes up with the conclusion, "They were everywhere." Probably at all times in Christian history one can find instances of homosexual behavior. And it is probably true that at some times more than others such behavior was viewed with "tolerance," in that it was treated with a wink and a nudge. Certainly that has been true of at least some Christian communities in the last forty years or so. The Church has always been composed of sinners, and some periods are more morally lax than others.

Despite his assiduous efforts, what Boswell's historical scavenger hunt does not produce is any evidence whatever that authoritative Christian teaching ever departed from the recognition that homosexual acts are morally wrong. In the years before, say, the fourth century, when Christian orthodoxy more firmly cohered, there are significant gaps in our knowledge, and numerous sects and heresies flourished, some of them bizarre also in their moral practices. This is a rich field for speculation and fantasy, and Boswell makes the most of it. He has failed, however, to persuade those who are expert in that period. For example, David Wright of Edinburgh wrote the article on homosexuality in the highly respected Encyclopedia of Early Christianity. After discussing the evidence, he summarily dismisses the Boswell book as "influential but highly misleading."

Also influential but highly misleading is another move made by the revisionists. What Paul meant by homosexuality is not what we mean by homosexuality today, they contend. Thus Boswell says that the people Paul had in mind are "manifestly not homosexual; what he derogates are homosexual acts committed by apparently heterosexual persons. The whole point of Romans 1, in fact, is to stigmatize persons who have rejected their calling, gotten off the true path they were once on." Paul, Boswell says, failed to distinguish "gay persons (in the sense of permanent sexual preference) and heterosexuals who simply engaged in periodic homosexual behavior."

This line of thinking is picked up in the Lutheran and similar statements to make the argument that, living as he did in the first century, Paul did not consider the possibility of "loving, committed, same-sex relationships." Since the situation of the biblical writers is not ours, what the Bible has to say about homosexuality is not relevant for Christians today. The logic of the argument goes farther: If Paul had known about people who were not capable of heterosexual relations and if he had known about loving, committed, same-sex relationships, he would have approved. The whole point of Romans 1, it is suggested, is that people should be true to who they really are-whether heterosexual or homosexual. The problem that Paul had was with heterosexuals who were false to themselves by engaging in homosexual acts.

Like many influential but misleading arguments, this one contains an element of truth. David Greenberg's The Construction of Homosexuality (University of Chicago Press, 1988) is a standard reference on these matters. Greenberg, who is himself sympathetic to the homosexual movement, emphasizes that the category "homosexual" is a late-nineteenth-century invention. Prior to that time, people did not speak about "the homosexual" or about "homosexuals" as a class of people. There were simply men who did curious things, including engaging in homogenital acts, that were viewed-in different cultures and to varying degrees-with puzzlement, tolerance, or (usually) strong disapproval. So the element of truth in the claim of the Boswell revisionists is that Paul, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Calvin, and a host of others who lived before the nineteenth century indeed did not know about a "homosexual community" in which people are involved in "loving, committed, same-sex relationships."

Historical "what ifs" are of very limited usefulness, but we might ask ourselves, What if Paul did know about homosexuality in the way that it is commonly presented today? What if he knew about a significant number of people, constituting a sizable subculture, who engaged only in homogenital sex and found heterosexual relations personally repulsive? If he believed that homosexual acts are contrary to nature and nature's God (the plain meaning of Romans 1), it would seem not to make any difference that there are a large number of people who disagree, who engage in such acts, and whose behavior is supported by a subculture and its sexual ideology. Nor would what today is called "sexual orientation" seem to make any difference. Sexual orientation means that one's desires are strongly (in some instances exclusively) directed to people of the same sex. This would likely not surprise Paul, who was no stranger to unruly and disordered desires. It was Paul who wrote, "I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. . . . Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" (Romans 7)

Revisionism takes other interesting twists. Episcopalian bishop John Spong, a prominent champion of the gay movement, is not alone in claiming that Paul was a repressed and frustrated homosexual. Leaving aside the anachronistic use of the term "homosexual," one cannot conclusively demonstrate that Paul did not experience sexual desire for men. (Proving a negative is always a tricky business.) But, if he did, this would then have been one of the "orientations" to evil against which he so heroically contended. Gay advocates who adopt the Spong line should take care. If Paul was a homosexual in the current meaning of the term, then it demonstrates precisely the opposite of what they want to demonstrate. It would demonstrate that Paul knew exactly the reality experienced by homosexuals and urged upon them the course he himself follows-resistance, repentance, conversion, and prayer for the grace "to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called." (Ephesians 4:1)

The revisionism being advanced today is influential, misleading, and deeply confused. Robert L. Wilken, the distinguished scholar of early Christianity at the University of Virginia, describes Boswell's book as "advocacy scholarship." By that he means "historical learning yoked to a cause, scholarship in the service of a social and political agenda." Wilken notes that Boswell's subtitle is Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. If, as Boswell insists, there were not "gay people" (in the contemporary meaning of the term) in the ancient world, and therefore Paul and other Christian authorities were only criticizing heterosexuals who engaged in homosexual acts, how can one write a history of gay people in that period of history? Wilken puts it gently: "Boswell creates historical realities that are self-contradictory, and hence unhistorical." Boswell writes that in antiquity there were no prejudices directed "to homosexual relations as a class." The reason is obvious, observes Wilken: as Boswell himself elsewhere recognizes, "the ancients did not think there was a class of people with sexual 'preferences' for the same sex."

Wilken writes, "The notion that there is a 'class' of people defined by sexual preference is a very recent idea that has no basis in western tradition. To use it as an interpretive category is confusing and promotes misunderstanding. Where there were laws or social attitudes against homosexuals, they had to do not with homosexuals as a class but with homosexual acts. Even where certain homosexual acts were tolerated by society (as in ancient Greece), there was no suggestion that sexual preference determined behavior or that certain people were thought to belong to a distinct group within society. Even when tolerated (for example, between an adult male and a youth), there was no social approval given an adult male who played the 'passive' role (the role of the boy)." And, as we have seen, Paul and the early Christians departed from the Greeks in judging homosexual acts per se to be unnatural and morally disordered.

"In some cases," Wilken notes, "Boswell simply inverts the evidence to suit his argument." For instance, Boswell writes that in antiquity some Roman citizens "objected to Christianity precisely because of what they claimed was sexual looseness on the part of its adherents." They charged, among other things, that Christians engaged in "homosexual acts," and Boswell says that "this belief seems to have been at least partly rooted in fact." As evidence Boswell cites Minucius Felix, a third-century writer who was answering charges brought against Christians by their Roman critics. Among the items mentioned by Minucius Felix, Boswell says, is the charge that Christians engage in "ceremonial fellatio" (the text actually says "worshiping the genitals of their pontiff and priest"). What Boswell fails to say is that this charge- along with others, such as the claim that Christians sacrificed children in the Eucharist-was manufactured out of whole cloth and historians have long dismissed such claims as having nothing to do with Christian behavior.

G.W. Clarke, the most recent commentator on the passage from Minucius Felix writes, "This bizarre story is not found elsewhere among the charges reported against the Christians." It is, says Clarke, the kind of invention that the opponents of Christianity "would have felt quite free to use for effective rhetorical polemic." It is noteworthy, observes Wilken, that no such charges appear in any of the texts written by critics of Christianity. They appear only in Christian writings (such as that of Minucius Felix), perhaps because they were slanderously passed on the streets or because their obvious absurdity gave Christian apologetics greater force. The situation, in short, is entirely the opposite of what Boswell suggests. While the passage from Minucius Felix gives no information about Christian behavior, it does undercut the burden of Boswell's argument. Boswell seems not to have noticed it, but the passage makes clear that, for both Romans and Christians, it was assumed that to charge someone with fellatio was to defame him. Both the Christians and their critics assumed that such behavior is a sign of moral depravity. This is hardly evidence of early Christian "tolerance" of homosexual acts.

It is the way of advocacy scholarship to seize upon snips and pieces of "evidence" divorced from their historical context, and then offer an improbable or fanciful interpretation that serves the argument being advanced. That is the way egregiously exemplified by Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. David Wright, the author of the pertinent encyclopedia article on homosexuality, wrote in 1989: "The conclusion must be that for all its interest and stimulus Boswell's book provides in the end of the day not one firm piece of evidence that the teaching mind of the early Church countenanced homosexual activity." Yet the ideologically determined are not easily deterred by the facts. As the churches continue to deliberate important questions of sexual morality, be prepared to encounter the invocation, as though with the voice of authority, "But Boswell says . . . "

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